System Administration

Currently serving as system administrator, postmaster, and webmaster
for four domain names I own, which are presently hosted on my home LAN.

Though I've never done system administration as a formal component of any job I've held,
it has often been necessary to become well-acquainted with system administration in
order to do other jobs, such as software development and technical writing.
Sometimes this has been due solely to the unusual hours I would work in order to
have more computer "time", back in the days of timesharing on large mainframes and
smaller superminicomputers.

Operating systems with which I've had significant expertise administering include
PRIMOS, VAX/VMS, TOPS-10, and TSS/8.
Though all of these are fairly "ancient", many
of the pertinent higher-level aspects of administering them have "trickled down" to
PC-based Unix and MS
Windows systems over the decades.
As examples, one must still
know how to make backups, verify them, and restore them as necessary; needs of users
must still be anticipated; resource utilization must still be carefully managed; and so on.

I've authored, and supervised the authoring of, several technical manuals on
system administration and operation.
Early in
my technical-writing career, I discovered that a table illustrating how to invoke the PRIMOS
equivalent of the Unix mkfs utility was erroneous, in that, if dutifully
followed, it would lead to overwriting at least a portion neighboring disk partition
when making (erasing) the desired one.
The manual containing the table was swiftly
fixed, and I was subsequently assigned the task of updating the manual more thoroughly.